It's no secret that Dembski and O'Leary are co-authoring a book on the evils of 'Christian Darwinism'. It will be fun to watch Dembski further marginalise himself from respectable academia but I wonder if they've thought out the broader implications.

The tack I assume they are going to take is that the idea that humans arose naturally and contingently is incompatible with God's fall/salvation/redemption project that Christianity espouses.

However, if Christianity in their eyes demands the appearance of humans as a deliberate act of crea....design, then so too must the Earth. For surely God is not going to leave his Great Plan at the mercy of natural law; hoping to himself that just the right kind of planet forms? No, just like humanity the Earth must have also been a special creation.

So it follows that Dembski and O'Leary are not only explicitly opposing common ancestry, but also the current and increasingly well supported nebula hypotheses of solar and planetary formation!

If you can't be a Christian and believe in a natural origin to humankind then you sure as hell can't be a Christian and hold to a naturalistic and contingent account of one of the necessary conditions of our existence - i.e. the Earth.

Thus, according to Dembski and O'Leary creationism is the only valid stance for a 'true' Christian.

So it follows that Dembski and O'Leary are not only explicitly opposing common ancestry, but also the current and increasingly well supported nebula hypotheses of solar and planetary formation!

And if the nebula hypotheses of solar and planetary formation is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg - isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!

--------------Any version of ID consistent with all the evidence is indistinguishable from evolution.

So it follows that Dembski and O'Leary are not only explicitly opposing common ancestry, but also the current and increasingly well supported nebula hypotheses of solar and planetary formation!

And if the nebula hypotheses of solar and planetary formation is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg - isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!

with Seti and every other subject that deals with finding "design", we are able to pinpoint a location of the source of design. With Seti we would be able to name a star system and a time frame of when the intelligent message was sent, and while we may not be capable of finding out who sent it, it's still a physical possibility that we could.___anosh g

In Christian Darwinism: Why Theistic Evolution Fails As Science and Theology (Broadman and Holman, November 2011), mathematician Dembski and journalist O’Leary address a powerful new trend to accommodate Christianity with atheist materialism, via acceptance of Darwinian ("survival of the fittest") evolution.

This trend includes "Evolution Sundays" at churches and endorsements by high administration officials like Francis Collins.

Dembski and O'Leary say it all just doesn't work. How can we accommodate self-sacrifice as the imitation of Christ with "altruism is just another way you spread your selfish genes!" How can we accommodate monogamy as the image of Christ and his church - for which he gave himself up - with "The human animal was never meant to be monogamous!"?

In the authors' view, no accommodation is possible. More to the point, accommodation is not even necessary. There are good reasons for doubting Darwin and good reasons for adopting other models for evolution - or for deciding that there is not enough evidence to make a decision.

Dembski and O'Leary insist that this conflict has nothing to do with the age of the Earth. Darwinism is, as they will show, the increasingly implausible creation story of atheism, which diverges at just about every point from the Christian worldview on which modern science was founded.

Yet Darwinism is publicly funded, and taught, in many jurisdictions, without any criticism permitted.

Reactions - not only praise but criticism - are expected and much appreciated! Regular updates will be provided at www.uncommondescent.com, so persons who wish to comment on the project can post there.

Posted by Denyse at 8/26/2010 08:36:00 amLabels: new book announcement

One of the authors has a history of slow writing, though.

--------------"[...] the type of information we find in living systems is beyond the creative means of purely material processes [...] Who or what is such an ultimate source of information? [...] from a theistic perspective, such an information source would presumably have to be God."

In Christian Darwinism: Why Theistic Evolution Fails As Science and Theology (Broadman and Holman, November 2011), mathematician Dembski and journalist O’Leary address a powerful new trend to accommodate Christianity with atheist materialism, via acceptance of Darwinian ("survival of the fittest") evolution.

This trend includes "Evolution Sundays" at churches and endorsements by high administration officials like Francis Collins.

Dembski and O'Leary say it all just doesn't work. How can we accommodate self-sacrifice as the imitation of Christ with "altruism is just another way you spread your selfish genes!" How can we accommodate monogamy as the image of Christ and his church - for which he gave himself up - with "The human animal was never meant to be monogamous!"?

In the authors' view, no accommodation is possible. More to the point, accommodation is not even necessary. There are good reasons for doubting Darwin and good reasons for adopting other models for evolution - or for deciding that there is not enough evidence to make a decision.

Dembski and O'Leary insist that this conflict has nothing to do with the age of the Earth. Darwinism is, as they will show, the increasingly implausible creation story of atheism, which diverges at just about every point from the Christian worldview on which modern science was founded.

Yet Darwinism is publicly funded, and taught, in many jurisdictions, without any criticism permitted.

Reactions - not only praise but criticism - are expected and much appreciated! Regular updates will be provided at www.uncommondescent.com, so persons who wish to comment on the project can post there.

His speed doesn't help the other one. The outcome of his thinking remains wrong.

--------------"[...] the type of information we find in living systems is beyond the creative means of purely material processes [...] Who or what is such an ultimate source of information? [...] from a theistic perspective, such an information source would presumably have to be God."

With ID indistuingishable from evolution (sans abiogenesis) except for just a couple of designer interventions like the debunked Behe argument about the bacterial flagellum, is TE all they've got left to write about?

ID makes strange bedfellows.

--------------The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. Richard Feynman